The Cape Girardeau Crash Before Roswell (Rev. William Huffman)

Six years before Roswell, a Baptist minister in southeast Missouri was reportedly called to a crash. The story reached print only in July 1991. That year Leonard Stringfield published a letter from Charlette Mann in his Status Report VI. The account had passed from Rev. William Guy Huffman to his wife Floy and his son Guy, then to Mann, his granddaughter. No first-hand statement from Huffman survives.

Mann placed it in the "spring of 1941 in the evening around 9:00 to 9:30." The police asked Huffman to go to a plane crash and pray for the victims. He was driven 13 to 15 miles out of town, then walked a quarter mile into a field. Author Paul Blake Smith puts the site west of the Cape Girardeau Airport, toward Chaffee.

It was not a plane. It was "a saucer, was how he described it." A rounded, shiny metallic shape "with no edges or seams" lay broken, with wreckage scattered around one large section. Metal shards had set the grass alight. Inside sat a small metal chair, panels of strange dials and gauges, and writing that "looked similar to hieroglyphics."

There were three. Each stood about 4 feet tall. They were thin, with no visible bone structure, "kind of soft looking." They had long arms and fingers, large heads, oversized oval eyes, small holes for a nose and ears, and a slit for a mouth. They wore wrinkled suits like aluminum foil.

In the 1991 account all three were dead. In a 2008 interview with KLTV, Mann said one was still "breathing very shallow." Huffman prayed with it. It died while he knelt beside it.

Military and plain-clothes men photographed everything. Huffman was told: "This did not happen. You did not see this. This is enormous national security. You're not to ever speak of it again."

One black-and-white print reportedly showed two men holding a small body upright between them. The family kept it until it was lent to Walter Wayne Fisk, who lost it. A different image later reached Stringfield through Michael Hesemann. Mann rejected it, and Kevin Randle calls it an obvious hoax showing what he believed was a monkey. Later research named the photographer as Garland D. "Frony" Fronabarger.

The FBI was "unable to identify records responsive to your request." The Air Force "found no documentation concerning this event." Neither Project Sign nor Project Blue Book holds a file. Mann said she found a declassified document confirming a 1941 retrieval, which Randle calls "apparently part of a leaked MJ-12 document." In 2001 Philip J. Klass discussed the Majestic papers that mention Cape Girardeau.

After checking church records, the 1940 census and draft cards, Lynda S. Thompson found that Huffman became pastor of Red Star Baptist Church only on 9 November 1941. In April 1941 he was ministering in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The photographer's son reportedly said it happened in 1943. Randle notes that Edward J. Ruppelt recorded officials "in a near panic" over the 1947 saucer wave, a reaction hard to square with a disc recovered in 1941. Still, Randle says the later-added details do "nothing to negate the core of the story."

Ryan S. Wood argues one can "reasonably conclude there was a crash event." Paul Blake Smith wrote MO41: The Bombshell Before Roswell. He admits: "Getting hard evidence for this has been like trying to nail JELL-O to the wall." Cape Girardeau now has a local UFO tour. The crash before Roswell has never been proven, and it has never gone away.